Heavens, Philippa Bevans! The Notorious Landlady (1962)

The Notorious Landlady is a 1962 romantic comedy thriller starring Kim Novak (she got top billing) and Jack Lemmon, with supporting performances from Fred Astaire (in a role that originally was to have gone to Ernie Kovacs), Estelle Winwood and Philippa Bevans.

Philippa who, you say?  I'm probably the only film fan who has ever watched this flick primarily to see the foursquare Philippa Bevans in action. Happily I can report that both the film and the seventh-billed member of the cast are good.  The script, which was co-written by future comedy stalwarts Blake Edwards and Larry Gelbart, was nominated by the WGA for the best written American film comedy of 1962.

trust but verify

Set in England (primarily London), The Notorious Landlady concerns the notorious "Carly" Hardwicke (Kim Novak), whose husband has disappeared under mysterious and sinister circumstances, leading her neighbors, like the wheelchair-bound nosy old biddy Mrs. Dunhill (Estelle Winwood) and her faithful nurse, Mrs. Agatha Brown (Philippa Bevans), to think that he was murdered by Carly, obviously some sort of insidious femme fatale.  (Maybe they saw Vertigo.)

tale of the tub

Not knowing about Carly's "notorious" background, ingenuous Bill Gridley (Jack Lemmon), a young, newly-posted American diplomat, takes rooms in Carly's elegant Regency townhouse, though his superior at the embassy, Franklyn Armbruster (Fred Astaire), has sternly warned him of the utmost need of avoiding scandal.

Naturally, Carly and Bill fall in love. But what exactly did happen to Carly's mysterious husband?

This film recalled to me other, better-known light romantic thrillers like To Catch a Thief, Charade, Arabesque and How to Steal a Million, starring such cinema luminaries as Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Sophia Loren and Peter O'Toole.

The first half of the film emphasizes romance, with the mystery placed on the slow burner; but then there's a shooting and a trial and a flight and pursuit finale at a Dartmouth convalescent home that involves the sort of manic slapstick that became a Blake Edwards trademark. Mark ye, my mystery fan friends, Mrs. Dunhill and her nurse, who suddenly loom large in the story line.

shadow of a doubt

I enjoyed this film.  Kim Novak is certainly alluring (the credits announce that she designed her own wardrobe) and Jack Lemmon is perfect for this sort of film, with his patented anxiety, double takes and slow burns.  Fred Astaire is as ever charm incorporated, though I did want him to glide his heels just a bit.

I don't know about you, but I have long adored that wonderfully eccentric Victorian/Edwardian relic, the English actress Estelle Winwood (1883-1984), who played drolly batty old biddies on television and in the films for three decades, from 1950 to 1980. 

She pops up in a series of genre films including, besides The Notorious Landlady, Dead Ringer, Games and Murder by Death, where she played Miss Marbles' (aka Miss Marple's) extremely aged nurse (she was 92 at the time), who loves nothing more than solving a good "murderpoo."  I was ten when I saw this film and I remember Miss Winwood in it well. Elsa Lanchester played Miss Marbles and the two women made a delightfully wacky comedy pair.

in hot pursuit

Miss Dunhill's nurse, Mrs. Agatha Brown, is played, as mentioned above, by Philippa Bevans, who, as I explained in an earlier blog post, was married for eight years to John M. O'Connor, a fellow stage actor and the author of a single mystery novel, Anonymous Footsteps (1932), now reprinted by Coachwhip, with an introduction by me.

O'Connor  dedicated his novel "To Philippa," whom he wed the next year.  Bevans went on to appear on Broadway in seventeen plays, most famously with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins' landlady in My Fair Lady.

Bevans, Novak

Like Andrews she did not appear in the film version of the play, though in the 1960s she was a player in some other films, including, besides The Notorious Landlady, The World of Henry Orient, The Group and Madigan, as well as episodes of the classic television anthologies The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  She specialized in the matron type, her figure having significantly broadened in her middle years.

Bevans has all of one line in Madigan, but in The Notorious Landlady her role is an important one, including a sort of wrestling match with Kim Novak, which you shouldn't forget any time soon. Also, if you have the original cast recording of My Fair Lady, you can hear her, albeit briefly, on "I Could Have Danced All Night"--a tune you may have heard on occasion!

he should have danced all night